You Won’t Forget Me by Mazey Eddings is a sapphic summer romance about Cubby Clark, a musician whose band is finally getting some real attention, partly because the Internet has misread a moment between Cubby and her bandmate as romantic. The band decides to lean into it, turning a fake relationship into a PR strategy that could help get their music heard. But a fake PR strategy still involves real feelings (and, arguably, a love trapezoid?). And the longer Cubby performs that version of herself, the harder it becomes to ignore the real question underneath it all: How much of yourself can you keep pretending away before the act costs more than it’s worth?
What the hell were we thinking? Why the fuck did I, a straight woman, hook up with my similarly straight best friend?
Mazey Eddings, You Won’t Forget Me
One of the things I loved most about this book is how Cubby isn’t a neatly packaged romance heroine who has already metabolized all her pain into charming self-awareness. Eddings lets her be difficult, tender, funny, self-sabotaging, brilliant, overwhelmed, and wildly human all at once. And just as you get swept up into the intensity of her highs and lows, you’ll end up catching yourself in the act of judging her for it all. You’ll slow down and really look at everything she’s dealing with. She’s being ruthlessly picked apart online, shoved into public narratives she didn’t fully choose, and trying to understand her sexuality while clearly struggling with depression. Of course she’s going to be a little messy!
But that’s where Eddings’ characterization feels so thoughtful to me. She isn’t flattened into a quirky disaster girl or a misunderstood tortured artist. There are so many layers to Cubby, and that’s what makes her feel so singular. It’s like Eddings papier-mâchéd her together with so much care and attention, building her out of scraps of rage, humor, loneliness, desire, defensiveness, talent, and aching vulnerability until there is no way you could find a dupe of her in another book. She is not designed to be effortlessly likable. She is designed to be recognized, familiar, and known. What a gift of a character!
Creating something always feels like breaking a bone just to document its healing… And sometimes it’s hard to pick which bone to break.
Mazey Eddings, You Won’t Forget Me
The romance itself also has that fizzy, stomach-flipping quality that makes a book like this so fun to read. All the yearning and lingering gazes are delicious, and the love scenes possess a rare sensory quality where it feels like someone else bit into a piece of fruit, but somehow the burst of flavor registers across your own tongue. There is heat, obviously, but there is also emotional texture. The intimacy feels connected to Cubby’s larger awakening, to the terrifying thrill of wanting something she has not fully let herself name, and to the way desire can make the body admit what the mind is still trying to argue with. Truly, what’s a little heavy snogging and shared orgasms between besties, right?
But the piece that really made this book sing for me was the way it handles creativity. The song lyrics function like pressure points where everything Cubby cannot say directly gets translated into music. Eddings shows how lyrics are layered in the way all art is layered: the listener hears one thing, the writer may have meant another, and somewhere between them is a third meaning neither person fully controls. The book beautifully captures the mysterious, gorgeous, vulnerable work of mining the most fractured yet whole and truest pieces of yourself to make something honest enough to reach another person.
Pride is, and always has been, a protest, a commitment to being your truest self regardless of the bigotry, the risk of hate and violence, from others.
Mazey Eddings, You Won’t Forget Me
By the end, You Won’t Forget Me left me with that rare, giddy feeling of having read something that understands both the thrill and the terror of becoming more honest with yourself. It’s sharp, swoony, and easy to devour. A perfect Pride Month read, but also the kind of summer romance that makes you want to roll down the windows and play the music too loud. My first Mazey Eddings read, and definitely not my last!
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for sharing an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
